Friday, February 17, 2017

I surprised my wife with a Chatbooks subscription for Valentines Day. I had 14 books from my Instagram feed printed and shipped to us:

My first Instagram pic of my first son pulling himself upfor the first time on the cover of our first Chatbook.

Chatbooks is an app you can install that syncs to your Instagram account. (You can also do something through Facebook and something through your "favorites" folder on your iPhone, but I haven't done that, so I can't speak about either of those options.) For $8 (INCLUDING SHIPPING) they will take the Instagram photos you select and print 60 in a book in chronological order. You can choose to have them include date, location, and caption if you wish.

Our first 7 books.

A look back nearly 5 years ago to a trip to the Minneapolis Instituteof Arts with my (then) 11-month-old (now kindergartener).

And every time you have enough Instagram photos to make a new book, they will automatically print and ship a new one for you. (My understanding is that they give you time to edit it or take out photos you don't want in it before it's printed.) They're always just $8.

Here's a QUITE hilarious video that tells you how it works. PARENTS, YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS:

- It's easy. As the video says, there's no formatting. Just select the photos you want.

- It's automatic. They'll keep printing/sending if you want them to.

- When you start you account, you can choose to get all your "old" books right away (like the 14 I just got), or you can space them out. There are different options like getting 1/month or 5/month until you're caught up. And being shipping is free, there's no extra cost to do that.

- It prints horizontal and vertical images just fine. I wasn't sure if it would crop everything to a square, but it didn't. It printed the photos the original way they were published on Instagram.

- You can choose if you want to show date, location, and or caption. Because I don't tag too many locations, I took that one off and left date and caption on.

- The cover photo defaults to the first photo in the book, but that's easily changed. I changed a few of my books, and left some with the cover being the first photo as well.

- It's pretty quick to get started. My Instagram account has nearly 2000 photos, and I got it down to just over 800 pretty quickly. (I could have spent a LITTLE more time fine-tuning it, but they still all look good.) And now it will be easy to stay caught up with future books.

CONS:

- You can't override any of the formatting. There were 2 places (among the 800+ pages of my 14 books) that I would have liked to have adjusted things myself, but you can't.

- You have to start from the BEGINNING of your Instagram account. You can't just select a random selection of photos to make a book, and then make a different book with different sections. (If that makes sense.) You have to start from the beginning and work through chronologically. Now I think there's a way around this that I just haven't explored - I think you can make a "custom" book with random photos, but again, I haven't tried that yet.

- Shipping/printing is slow. This really isn't a big deal, but it's worth noting if (you were like me and) you want to get your "old" books by a certain date. Like Valentine's Day. You can spend an extra $2/book to get it sped up, but at this point, I don't care how fast the books come once they're made.

- Some emojis don't print. OH THE HORROR!! Here's an example of emojis that WORKED and emojis that DIDN'T:

The heart and swimmer emoji turned out fine...

... but the American flag didn't come through.

NEUTRAL: (issues that aren't good or bad, but things I'd like to point out)

- Print quality is fine. It's not the best, but it works.

- Paper thickness is good. It's what it needs to be for books that size, without being SUPER sturdy.

- This is for "cute" photos (good for your family or possibly for gifts for your kid's grandparents), and doesn't have a real "professional" application. Don't make a "photo book" of your work with this book. Make an album of your cute kids, your travels, etc.

From 2.5 years ago: my youngest when he was just 2 months old.

Bottom line: I like my subscription and will continue getting books made. I average about 1 Instagram post/day, and once I edit out what I don't need printed, I would suspect I'd have 60 pics every 90-120 days or so. That's 3-4 books/year, which is $24-$32/year to have my favorite family photos archived in print. Totally worth it! Thanks Chatbooks!